When I ran a #blocklist one principle I followed was a question of utility: On a transphobe blocklist you _very well might not block JK Rowling_.
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Second:
Rowling doesn't typically go after random trans people unless you are brought to her attention. Might she? Yes. Absolutely, but as a general rule she'd have to _find you_ first and she gets so many interactions in a day that it's usually some lieutenant or henchman that brings you to her attention… and if that is true blocking her does no good.
So you aren't adding anything useful _and_ you aren't providing much protection.
3/
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Third:
Rowling is not actually all that interesting. Outside of her platform she is just a garden variety transphobe. You can _just_ mute her and get almost all of your benefit.
A _blocklist_ is about blocking access. On mastodon it is about blocking _your_ access to _them_ more than _their_ access to _you_.
It's just not required if what you are trying to do is prevent harassment from transphobes to block every transphobe, even particularly noxious ones.
4/
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As a general principle, if your goal is to increase safety
* Bigger accounts are less likely to need to be blocked.
* Older accounts are less likely to need to be blocked.
* More passive accounts are less likely to need to be blocked.But most blocklists aren't run this way and consensus blocklists exacerbate this situation.
Those will tend to focus on older accounts. They will tend to focus on bigger accounts. Their detection of passive accounts will go up over time.
This doesn't help.
5/
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The same is basically true when you are doing community moderation. If you want to maintain a culture you tend to be:
* aggressive with smaller, newer accounts.
* more flexible with older accountsThis doesn't mean you can give them a free pass. At all. If you are moderating especially. But it _does_ mean that you need to handle them differently.
But most blocklists and especially _consensus_ blocklists reverse this. Which causes a lot of collateral damage and does not improve safety.
6/6
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@hrefna As someone who'd use such a list, I'd disagree. JKR is a canonical example of who I'd expect such a list to block. If the list doesn't block her, what other well-known transphobes will it also not block? If I want transphobes automatically blocked, having the most obvious ones not blocked limits it's utility to me.
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@tknarr "I want to run a list poorly because that's how I will advertise it" is one way you can look at it, I suppose, but it's not a good approach.
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@hrefna Yes there's collateral damage. That's the point, and I want it to happen. I'm using that list because their being a transphobe is enough of a hard nope for me that I don't want to interact with them on any other subject either except under exceptional circumstances.
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@tknarr You can curate your social media feed however you like. This is about how you do community management appropriately and ethically
Under that model you can make a case for it or against it, but I don't care and that is completely orthogonal to the point I was making
But since you are replying to the first post of my thread, which is obviously a thread, and focusing in on a demonstrationl I'm going to just assume that you haven't read and aren't going to read or think about anything else
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@tknarr do you understand what the words "collateral damage" means?
If you want there to be collateral damage in a blocklist then you are far far past reasoning with.
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@hrefna I understand the term quite well. When I dealt with it, "collateral damage" meant "block all email from entire ISPs and all their customers". And I was fine with that, because measures that didn't go that far had been tried repeatedly for years and weren't working. Email spam was still a massive problem even with individual anti-spam measures in place. So, massive collateral damage it was. And you know what? It worked. ISPs started to clean up their acts.
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@hrefna And yes, we were called unreasonable then too, for many of the same reasons. We noticed patterns in the people who called us unreasonable, too.
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@tknarr Strike 3. Really more like strike 6 if we were counting swings instead of tosses, but here we are.
Peace.
